christmas disaster

so even when you're celebrating a low-key christmas in china with five of your friends, and all the food has been cooked by someone else and you just have to pick it up, there is still room for a christmas day kitchen disaster:



merry christmas if that's your thing! and remember to put the lid on your pumpkin puree, even when you're only heating it up for five minutes. although who has pumpkin puree at christmas? i mean really.

not yet pad thai success

I love pad thai so much, that peanut deliciousness and rice noodles and vegetables. It is a great way to eat noodles!

Sadly, it is a noodle dish that I have so far failed to replicate at home.

We've tried many different methods: using peanut butter; crushing peanuts; mixing together so many different sauces. We've tried cheater methods and long-form methods. We've tried recipes from Thai bloggers and recipes from people who claim their recipes are so totally wrong but so totally delicious.

Still, so far, giant failure. Is it because we'll never replicate pad thai without fish sauce? I hope not, because that means the pad thai we get from our local is not suitable for us, AND the cheerful man there lied to me.



This one was okay, but still not quite right.

desperately seeking brownies

Check out this chocolate + coconut brownie! Doesn't it look great?



Here it is again, served with Tofutti Better Pecan icecream. Oh yeah ice cream.



Shame this brownie was not good at all. It was dry and nowhere near chocolate-y enough. SADFACE.

I have yet to successfully make a delicious vegan brownie. So please feel free to recommend recipes to me! I (and Danni) would really appreciate it!

what to do when your bread fails to rise?

I made my very first attempt at making bread from scratch last week! It was the rosemary bread in Veganomicon, and the yeast totally failed to activate. I don't know if this is because I used standard yeast from the shops and the recipe calls for activated, or if the recipe just fails to note this (I am at work), but yes, it was a gigantic failure.



I didn't want to just throw the dough out, so we made pizza instead, and that worked great. The pizza needed to be in the oven for about twenty minutes at 190C, it crisped up really well. And I'm glad to know failed bread works for pizza base, because there's more bread making in my future, and it's nice to have a fall back if it turns in to more fail bread.